What are hashtags, and how to use them?

In a nutshell, a hashtag is the pound sign on your keyboard placed directly in front of any word or phrase. What this does, is it makes this word more easily searchable. You can use hashtags in several ways.

Even though hashtags are most commonly associated with twitter, they can also be used in a myriad of other platforms, including your website! But to demonstrate how to use a hashtag lets go to twitter and follow these steps to learn more:

You should see in the top area that there is an empty search field. Here you can look for people, topics, and hashtags.

Try searching for people talking about their lawn for example. If you are a lawn and garden business, you can repeat this search on twitter to find out trends, respond to people talking about your area of expertise, people asking questions about lawns, and people who you can follow.

So try typing in #lawn. As you can see, there are many search results. From here, you can to scan these people’s messages to find new people to follow and talk to. This helps build your online community, and brings you new customers.

Now, try flipping it and post a message using the hashtag lawn. That way, if anyone is looking for information, and searches #lawn... your tweet will appear. This increases the likelihood of relevant customers finding you

So if you were a lawn and garden business you could offer a special to your Twitter followers.

This is just a quick example. There are many different hashtags that are relevant to your business...including the neighborhood, city, state, and industry keywords. We recommend you do a search to familiarize yourself on how others use these hashtags!